LinkedIn has changed. Your reach is paying for it.
Lately I’ve noticed a huge drop in post reach. I’m not the only one. Some of the most substantive contributors in my network — Cindy Gallop, Erin Gallagher, Isvari Maranwe, Beth Massa, and plenty of others — are seeing the same thing. Posts that used to land just… don’t.
Something shifted. I went digging. It’s not great.
Think Instagram plus AI, dressed up in “fostering meaningful connections” language. Here’s the short version:
- LinkedIn now shows you what it thinks you want to see, even if the content is weeks or months old. Recency is dead. Relevance, as defined by an opaque algorithm, is the new game. (There’s a way to fight back. More on that in the next post.)
- The first hour of any new post is everything. Specifically: how many people engage — not just like — in that first hour determines how far LinkedIn pushes your post. Not much activity early on? Throttled. Same playbook Instagram has been running for years.
This is especially brutal for people whose voices LinkedIn already deprioritizes: women, BIPOC, disabled, queer, and other marginalized creators. Reach was harder to earn before. Now the slope is steeper.
But at least it explains the pattern.
Over the next few posts, I’ll cover what to do about it, starting with how to train your feed to show you what you actually want to see. After that: how to time and structure your own posts so they survive the first-hour cull, and why all of this makes a strong profile more important now, not less.